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June 9, 2010
Atlantic Yards and the Perils of Community Benefit Agreements
Planetizen
by Lance Freeman
The CBA has been criticized on a number of grounds, with detractors arguing that it doesn’t provide enough affordable housing, that the agreement is not leally enforceable, that the community organizations are on the developer’s payroll, etc. For the sake of argument let’s say the CBA is enforceable, that the developer will live up to it, and that the benefits are generous by anybody’s standards. How should the CBA fit into our calculus when evaluating the Atlantic Yards?
While the CBA does at least give some of the most disenfranchised residents an opportunity to reap some benefits from the project, this is an undemocratic way to insure community input into a planning process. The signatories to the CBA may indeed represent a disenfranchised segment of the community. They may be organic members of the community. But they may not. The point is there is no mechanism to insure that the “community” in a CBA is representative of the community. If the signatories to the CBA were simply viewed as another interest group, that might be ok. But the CBA is being presented as illustrative of the development’s community input. Public officials are posing for pictures with the developer and signatories to the CBA, giving the impression that the community had significant input into the planning Atlantic Yards. This is not necessarily the case.
Posted by eric at June 9, 2010 11:41 AM